Rate My Professor Nick Roy

Roy earned a B.Sc. in Physics with a minor in Cognitive Science from McGill University in 1995 (graduated with distinction), an M.Sc. in Computer Science from McGill University in 1997 (Dean's Honours List), and a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 under supervisors Sebastian Thrun and Tom Mitchell. During graduate studies, he held the Fonds FCAR Ph.D. Fellowship (1997-2001) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Scholarship (1997). Joining MIT post-Ph.D., he advanced to full professor and, on sabbatical, founded and led Project Wing at Google X, developing prototype drone-delivery systems. His research centers on robotics, machine learning, autonomous systems, planning and reasoning under uncertainty, human-computer interaction, and micro air vehicles. Developments include algorithms coupling perception and decision-making for robust operation in dynamic environments without GPS, predictive planning from experience, natural language model learning, and GPS-free urban navigation for UAVs and ground vehicles. Key publications comprise 'Probabilistic Algorithms and the Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Minerva' (International Journal of Robotics Research, 2000), 'Collaborative Robot Exploration and Rendezvous: Algorithms, Performance Bounds and Observations' (Autonomous Robots, 2001), and 'Toward Optimal Active Learning through Monte Carlo Estimation of Error Reduction' (ICML, 2001). With over 33,800 citations and h-index of 89, his work influences autonomous robotics; he earned MIT's Committed to Caring award in 2019.